


Security Measures

by GrayJay



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 10:04:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1465348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrayJay/pseuds/GrayJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s never been a clear line where he stops and the scar tissue begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Security Measures

**Author's Note:**

> Can be read as the first half a diptych, with ["Visiting Rights"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1203712); "Security Measures" is set a few years prior.
> 
> The detail about the DVDs is borrowed from ["Twenty Random Facts About Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters,"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/25315) by Penknife.
> 
> The contents of the safety deposit box are taken from _All New X-Men_ #7, with a few changes to account for the time difference.

A handful of the faculty offices have locks, but Scott is the only one who routinely carries the keys to his. In a school full of mutants—let alone Ororo and Remy—even deadbolts are mostly symbolic. Still, every year or so, there’ll be a few students who see them as a challenge and decide that Mr. Summers, who is uptight and demanding and wholly unflappable in the classroom, needs to be taken down a notch.

The subsequent lecture is always nominally about respecting other people’s property, but the real takeaway is that extra chores and revoked privileges aren’t nearly as unsettling as seeing Mr. Summers get really, genuinely angry. Scott’s the kind of guy who writes his name neatly in the inside cover of every book and on every DVD: he yells when students gets sloppy in the Danger Room, but when someone messes with his stuff, he takes it _personally_ , and no one has tried to pry his door twice. 

It’s also Scott who lobbies every year to keep locks on the student lockers, even though every year they discover and confiscate a new and exciting spectrum of contraband. Rates of homelessness and exploitation among mutant youth still dwarf the national average, and Scott remembers what it was like to be the kid who was afraid to put anything down for more than a moment. If he’s being honest, he still kind of is and probably always will be that kid, but it’s easier to let everyone else assume that the safety deposit boxes and bug-out bags are just Cyclops being Cyclops and overpreparing for every contingency. Meanwhile, he keeps an eye out for the students who clutch improbably bulging schoolbags, who case the exits every time they walk into a room. Scott keeps a cabinet of empty file drawers—the kind that lock—in his office, and a few times a semester, he’ll quietly pull a kid aside and offer them a key. 

* * *

Scott has never thought of himself as kind so much as attentive: he notices, he evaluates, he responds, and there are some things he recognizes even when he’d rather not. He’s not fond of playing guidance counselor, but he doesn’t hate it as much as he hates the idea of a kid stuck where he’s been without anyone to throw down a rope.

He suspects Ororo might get that—not that he’d ever say it aloud. Faculty advisors are assigned alphabetically, then shift organically—by request or necessity—and when the dust settles, the most difficult, damaged kids have usually landed with one or the other of them. It’s not that no one else cares; it’s just that no one else is quite so good at staring the ugly stuff in the face without flinching. 

Ororo gives the wild, angry kids something to push back against and meets them with open arms when they’ve worn themselves out fighting. Scott collects the silent, scared ones: kids in less danger of blowing down the walls than slipping quietly through the cracks. He’s not a hugger like Ororo, but that’s probably for the best—most of them wouldn’t come to him if he were.

* * *

Jean is a hugger—of course Jean is a hugger. Jean loves freely and trusts easily and forgives slowly. Scott forgives easily and trusts seldom and only with great effort. He makes lists of the things he loves about Jean, and worries that maybe it’s not love at all, but some kind of twisted craving for all the parts he’s missing, the kind of overwhelming hunger that leads malnourished kids to eat wood chips and clay. 

Scott thinks he must have been happy as a kid, or at least satisfied. He remembers sitting on his father’s lap, proudly naming every switch in the cockpit of the old de Havilland Mosquito, but that memory is ruptured and spliced Frankenstein-like to another, where the cockpit is full of smoke and the switches have stopped mattering.

There are days when he wakes up certain that he’s still falling, and walks around with his head spinning and a coppery tang in his mouth, wondering if he’s nothing but the hallucination of a terrified ten-year-old seconds from death.

* * *

Who is Scott Summers? He wonders, looks for some fundamental core of _self_ under all the damage, and it scares him that he doesn’t know. There’s never been a clear line where he stops and the scar tissue begins.

Scott considers the might-have-beens, splinter universes branching from critical crossroads or casual accidents:

The one where the plane never went down.  
The one where the plane went down but both parachutes were intact and they all got out alive.  
The one where he was the only survivor.  
The one where there were no survivors.

He fixates on Alex as a point of comparison: Alex, who grew up without Sinister or Jack or Xavier, memories intact; and if not happy, then at least briefly normal. Alex shoots plasma from his chest and sports his kid-brother insecurity like a badge, but beyond that, he’s aggressively _regular_ , the kind of guy you’d want to grab a beer and watch the game with.

Could Scott have been that? He’s not sure. These days the biggest part of what he and Alex have in common is that both have spent their lives stuck in Scott’s shadow.

* * *

The things Scott hides—in his desk, in duffel bags, in the safety deposit box—fall into two categories: things he might need, and things he's afraid to lose. The first category is full of spare glasses and visors, passports, cash, cell phones: everything he’d need to split on a moment’s notice, and to fight as he ran. The second is sentimental: wedding invitations, faded photographs. There’s a lock of Jean’s hair, his first wedding ring (Maddy’s is long lost; Scott suspects Alex might have it but acknowledges that he’s given up the right to ask.), a necklace of his mother’s, a few ticket stubs, Nathan's first tiny shoes, half a pair of cufflinks.

Jean doesn’t even take a camera on vacations—she’d rather have memories than photographs, she says—but Scott knows better than to trust himself to keep anything of value safe.


End file.
